| Popis: |
In studies devoted to slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean, it is not unusual to find the labels "marginality" or "segregation" (and its opposed "integration") to refer to enslaved people. In fact, it is not surprising that some medieval history manuals, as well as some general reference works pay little attention to the presence of slave population in Mediterranean urban communities. Nevertheless, late medieval societies had an especially diverse human geography, largely as a consequence of slavery. In fact, analysing these societies without taking into account the slave population or, in the best-case scenario, describing the slave population as "marginalized" or "segregated" (somehow socially disconnected from the rest of the population) inevitably leads to an impoverished interpretation of the past. Thus, this paper aims to rethink the use of the concepts "segregation" and "marginality" applied to the field of social history and, more specifically, to slavery history. |
